Arts & Entertainment

Best Curmudgeon Houston 2011 - Don Walsh, Rusted Shut

"Curmudgeon" may not be quite the right word for Don Walsh. The Rusted Shut front man can be effusive and quite friendly, especially when we run into him at a show or in his random, rambling phone calls to our office that always seem to happen on Friday afternoons. Put him onstage with his long-running heavy-metal noise-rock band, though, and suddenly Walsh is as surly as they come. Rusted Shut's genre, as listed on the band's Facebook Page, is "FUCK YOU." Trust us, it fits — out of the dozens of acts we saw at this year's Free Press Summer Fest, the best time we had all weekend was watching Walsh flog his guitar and scream "Kill! Kill! Kill!" for several minutes. Now if that's not curmudgeonly, we don't know what is.